It’s May, and this northern city is finally greening. The buildings, the built world, are the same, but the infrastructure of trees, dozing during the winter months, is rousing. Spring has moved northward on its own mysterious, rhythmic, and dependable calendar. It...
It’s almost axiomatic now to think unpleasantly about downtowns. They’re this, they’re that, they’re the other thing. Unappealing, worsening. Here’s a contrary view, from my desk in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota on a regular old Tuesday morning, a cold spring day....
This time of year, I can become a touch weary with the wearing o’ the green. The sweeping and wonderful Irish folkloric culture seems a bit, well, debased in March, with the fairy folk diminished to cartoonish leprechauns and powerful old tales reduced to green...
I had an event the other night with our adjustable bed. I have re-written that sentence four times so far. I had an encounter. An incident. A surprise. A shocking surprise. A skirmish. Something that woke me the hell up. Something that brought me bolt upright except...
There are some had-been-going-moribund terms reappearing in our daily discourse over the last few years. Grifter. Shyster. Flim-flam man. There is wide public use; there are obvious public examples. Plural. Yet, somehow, these terms seem too small for the present...
